Books: Old Folks

YEARS ARE SO LONG—Josephine Lawrence—Stokes ($2.50).

Though Years Are So Long could not be called propaganda for Mother's Day, it is a novel with a Social Message. Its message is in the form of an implicit and unresolved question: Who is responsible for aged parents, and what is to be done about them? The unsentimental coldness with which Author Lawrence states her typical case-history is well calculated to shock readers into horrified protest, but the exaggerated indifference of her manner saves her story from drabness, gives it a painful point.

Old Mr. Cooper, a very...